DICTATOR'S YOUTH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 803, 10 December 1954, Page 13

DICTATOR'S YOUTH

YOUNG HITLER, by August Kubizek; Allan Wingate, English price 18/-. . J{ITLER'S humble origin only partially accounts for the scarcity of information about his youth, A difficult, uncongenial disposition repelled friendly advances and made his life a solitary one. Indeed, he appears to have had only one real friend-the author of this book, who knew him intimately from the age of 15 to 19, or from 1904 to 1908. The picture drawn is that of a sickly young puritan with no sense of humour, who even in those days treated individual companions as though they were public meetings, and couldn’t bear to be argued with or contradicted. A father’s mania for changing houses ("When I met Adolph he remembered seven removals and had been to five different sehools’’) seems to have been indirectly perpetuated in the son, whose talent lay in the diréction of architecture, by a mania for wanting to pull down and rebuild cities. While entertaining apparently fantastic ambitions Hitler shunned practice and cherished theory., He gave endless labour to the complete renovation, on paper, of Vienna and Linz, but refused to seek profitable employment, and, at least after being denied admission to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, carefully avoided any test of ability. An ardent

pacifist, he waited eagerly for the ‘Storm of Revolution" (presumably bloodless) to destroy the degenerate Hapsburg Empire. A devoted admirer of Wagner, he was inspired on first hearing the opera Rienzi to envisage himself as founder of the "Ideal State" by which that Empire would be succeeded. At one time he fell in love with a girl to whom he never even ventured to speak, an unexceptionable standard of propriety forbidding him to do so because he had not been introduced. As is pointed out in a foreword by Trevor Roper, this memoir is important because it gives a unique insight into Hitler’s character in process of forma"tion. Less important, though possibly more entertaining, is the commentary it provides on the character of the longsuffering Mr. Kubizek, whose forbearance in the face of provocation compares favourably with that of either Job or Chaucer’s patient Griselda. |

R. M.

Burdon